I hung from a girder and showed the fence a transparent showcase filled with all my trophies. It did some scans, checked the authenticity, and whistled. “Fuck me, these are real. That’s all unauthorized mass. How the hell? This is a life’s work of mass-based tourism. You really want me to broker sales on all of this?”
“Can you?”
“To Purth-Anaget, of course. They’ll go nuts. Collectors down there eat this shit up. But security will find out. I’m not even going to come back on the ship. I’m going to live off this down there, buy passage on the next outgoing ship.”
“Just get me the audience, it’s yours.”
A virtual shrug. “Navigation, yeah.”
“And emergency services.”
“I don’t have that much pull. All I can do is get you a secure channel for a low-bandwidth conversation.”
“I just need to talk. I can’t send this request up through proper channels.” I tapped my limbs against my carapace nervously as I watched the fence open its large, hinged jaws and swallow my case.
Oh, what was I doing? I wept silently to myself, feeling sick.
Everything I had ever worked for disappeared in a wet, slimy gulp. My reason. My purpose.
Armand was suspicious. And rightfully so. It picked and poked at the entire navigation plan. It read every line of code, even though security was only minutes away from unraveling our many deceits. I told Armand this, but it ignored me. It wanted to live. It wanted to get to safety. It knew it couldn’t rush or make mistakes.
But the escape pod’s instructions and abilities were tight and honest.
It has been programmed to eject. To spin a certain number of degrees. To aim for Purth-Anaget. Then burn. It would have to consume every last little drop of fuel. But it would head for the metal world, fall into orbit, and then deploy the most ancient of deceleration devices: a parachute.
On the surface of Purth-Anaget, Armand could then call any of its associates for assistance.
Armand would be safe.
Armand checked the pod over once more. But there were no traps. The flight plan would do exactly as it said.
“Betray me and you kill me, remember that.”
“I have made my decision,” I said. “The moment you are inside and I trigger the manual escape protocol, I will be unable to reveal what I have done or what you are. Doing that would risk your life. My programming”—I all but spit the word—“does not allow it.”
Armand gingerly stepped into the pod. “Good.”
“You have a part of the bargain to fulfill,” I reminded. “I won’t trigger the manual escape protocol until you do.”
Armand nodded and held up a hand. “Physical contact.”
I reached one of my limbs out. Armand’s hand and my manipulator met at the doorjamb and they sparked. Zebibytes of data slithered down into one of my tendrils, reshaping the raw matter at the very tip with a quantum-dot computing device.
As it replicated itself, building out onto the cellular level to plug into my power sources, I could feel the transfer of ownership.
I didn’t have free will. I was a hull maintenance form. But I had an entire fucking share of a galactic starship embedded within me, to do with what I pleased when I vested and left riding hulls.
“It’s far more than you deserve, robot,” Armand said. “But you have worked hard for it and I cannot begrudge you.”
“Goodbye, asshole.” I triggered the manual override sequence that navigation had gifted me.
I watched the pod’s chemical engines firing all-out through the airlock windows as the sphere flung itself out into space and dwindled away. Then the flame guttered out, the pod spent and headed for Purth-Anaget.
There was a shiver. Something vast, colossal, powerful. It vibrated the walls and even the air itself around me.
Armand reached out to me on a tight-beam signal. “What was that?”
“The ship had to move just slightly,” I said. “To better adjust our orbit around Purth-Anaget.”
“No,” Armand hissed. “My descent profile has changed. You are trying to kill me.”
“I can’t kill you,” I told the former CEO. “My programming doesn’t allow it. I can’t allow a death through action or inaction.”
“But my navigation path has changed,” Armand said.
“Yes, you will still reach Purth-Anaget.” Navigation and I had run the data after I explained that I would have the resources of a full share to repay it a favor with. Even a favor that meant tricking security. One of the more powerful computing entities in the galaxy, a starship, had dwelled on the problem. It had examined the tidal data, the flight plan, and how much the massive weight of a starship could influence a pod after launch. “You’re just taking a longer route.”
I cut the connection so that Armand could say nothing more to me. It could do the math itself and realize what I had done.
Armand would not die. Only a few days would pass inside the pod.
But outside. Oh, outside, skimming through the tidal edges of a black hole, Armand would loop out and fall back to Purth-Anaget over the next four hundred and seventy years, two hundred days, eight hours, and six minutes.
Armand would be an ancient relic then. Its beliefs, its civilization, all of it just a fragment from history.
But until then I had to follow its command. I could not tell anyone what happened. I had to keep it a secret from security. No one would ever know Armand had been here. No one would ever know where Armand went.
After I vested and had free will once more, maybe I could then make a side trip to Purth-Anaget again and be waiting for Armand when it landed. I had the resources of a full share, after all.
Then we would have a very different conversation, Armand and I.
Contributors’ Notes
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Crawford, and Locus Awards and was shortlisted for a Hugo; also a novella called Rock Manning Goes for Broke and a short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her next novel is The City in the Middle of the Night, which comes out in January 2019. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Boston Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Wired, Slate, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, ZYZZYVA, Catamaran Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and tons of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award, and “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” won a Theodore Sturgeon Award. She hosts the long-running Writers with Drinks reading series in San Francisco.
■ “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” feels like a huge primal scream on paper, like I was venting all of my sheer terror and anger about being a transgender person in the Trump era. But when I look back at it now, I’m surprised at how much artifice there is. There’s wordplay, there’s weird whimsical anecdotes, there’s a lot of odd little devices. To some extent, all of that stuff represents me trying to lure people into reading my dark gut punch of a story about horrific abuses. But I feel like it’s also a survival tactic—we survive by escaping into fancy, and the fancier the better, plus I’m a huge believer in the power of creativity and even silliness to get us through the darkness—and it’s also a way of trying to build a more complete picture of the world that let this happen and the befouled relationship between the two main characters, Rachel and Jeffrey. The actual germ of this story started with the common phrase that trans people use, deadnaming. When you refer to someone by the name he/she/they used before transition, you are using their deadname. I thought about that metaphor, of trying to shackle someone to a dead self, and started to build it out into something Frankensteinesque. I wrote this story in the middle of a huge political and social panic attack, and imagining the worst possible outcome actually did prove somewhat cathartic. I’m still terrified and angry, but I feel as though, like Rachel, I’m going to fight back the best I can.
Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times best-selling author bo
rn in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work. His novels and over sixty stories have been translated into eighteen different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio, with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at www.TobiasBuckell.com.
■ I’ve had the title for this story and a rough idea about the setting for years, waiting for the alchemy of “something else” to strike that would give me character and meaning. Early in 2016 I was thinking a lot about resistance after reading Women in Grenadian History, 1783–1983, by Nicole Laurine Phillip. My roots are Grenadian, and the history in Phillip’s book inspired me to fuse the core idea of passive resistance with thoughts about artificial intelligence, belief, and how the dispossessed can still find routes of resistance. The way the mind fuses these things together into story is always magical and delightful to me when I set out to find a story in things like this. I was not expecting that when the story came out in 2017, it would resonate with so many.
Gwendolyn Clare is the author of the young adult steampunk novels Ink, Iron, and Glass (2018) and Mist, Metal, and Ash (2019). Her short stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among other publications. She teaches college biology in central Pennsylvania, where she lives with too many cats and never enough books.
■ This is unusual for me, but in the case of “Tasting Notes” I can actually point to a specific moment of inspiration. I attended a wonderful talk by medievalist Michael Livingston at a writers’ conference, and in describing his research on the Battle of Crécy, he mentioned acquiring key information from, of all things, a cook’s journal. I was fascinated with the idea of reconstructing major political events from the perspective of someone whose concerns are tangential to those events—people like that cook, who was more worried about how many chickens the English king was eating than he was about the battle they were marching toward.
As you can probably tell from the story, I am also an incurable wine snob. Anything worth enjoying is also worth analyzing to death—that’s my motto. It’s a particularly interesting challenge to try to describe senses like taste, smell, and mouthfeel, because there’s such a paucity of words for those (in the English language, at least).
Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction and fantasy tales are available in Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories. His collections Atlantis: Three Tales and Phallos are experimental fiction. His novels include science fiction, such as the Nebula Award–winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova and Dhalgren. Most recently he has written the science fiction novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. His short novel The Atheist in the Attic appeared this past February.
In 2013 Delany was made the thirty-first Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master of Science Fiction. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett.
■ “The Hermit of Houston,” he tells us, “was my attempt to write a post-Trump science fiction story.”
Jaymee Goh is an equatorial child who likes to poke snow. She is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop class of 2016 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California, Riverside, where she dissertated on whiteness in steampunk. Her short stories, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of venues, such as Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, and Science Fiction Studies. She coedited The Sea Is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia and edited The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 11: Trials by Whiteness.
■ On an annual trip to the Singapore Flyer fish spa, Joyce Chng (whom I coedited The Sea Is Ours with) and I determined that we would each write a fish spa story. “The Last Cheng Beng Gift” was drafted during my first week at Clarion and was jokingly referred to as the start of “disappointing children stories” in my class. It features two practices in Chinese folk religion still widely celebrated in Malaysia and Singapore: Cheng Beng, or Qing Ming, during which Chinese people clean the tombs of their ancestors and send gifts to the afterlife so our recently deceased may live comfortably there, and the Hungry Ghost Festival, either a day or a month (depending on where it’s celebrated) during which the gates of the underworld open for the dead to visit the living. I wrote this for fellow Asian daughters who have similarly fraught relationships with their mothers, and from whom filial piety demands a gratitude that we can’t give freely. The conventional narrative wants us to reconcile with our (oft-abusive) parents, and I wanted to find a more compassionate way of acknowledging both our pain and our parents’ skewed love.
Maria Dahvana Headley is the New York Times best-selling author of six books, including the novels Magonia and Aerie and, most recently, The Mere Wife, a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf, to be followed by a new verse translation of Beowulf in 2019. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Nebula Awards and included in many year’s-best anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016. She’s a MacDowell Colony Fellow and currently lives in Brooklyn, though she constantly thinks about uprooting to a remote volcanic island.
■ “Black Powder” began because both sides of my family have been in America a long time—one side English blacksmiths, the other side Mayflower wanderers who edged west from Plymouth Rock. I grew up in the very rural southwest corner of Idaho. We had the historic Headley rifles—famous for being used in the “Indian wars”—in the house when I was a kid. When my dad killed himself in 2004, his father wrote to us, wanting to reclaim them. My siblings and I unearthed the pawn tickets, but we had no intention of letting these guns be treasured. Without need for discussion, we set the tickets on fire. A decade later, Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin commissioned a story for The Djinn Falls in Love. I pitched them the pleasant thing I thought I was going to write, then didn’t write it. I had a notion about the ultimate confined, dangerous metal space for a djinn; not a lamp, but a bullet in a pawnshop gun. I had to invent some backwoods gay heroes and fling in something read when I was in fourth grade, in the Idaho history program. That program was unusually good—it went deeply into genocide and usurping of land. The relevant story here is about a French Canadian fur trapper who kept marrying female guides from the local tribes, because without those women none of these dudes could do anything but be gobbled by bears. In the version I recall, this trapper kept beating up his pregnant wives, until finally one of them stood by, let him be eaten, and went about her own hunting. I’m worried I made that story up (it defies search engines), but even when I was ten, I knew what justice was. I like to think I still do.
“The Orange Tree” started as a gift from a writer friend of mine, who’d run across a paragraph about an eleventh-century female golem made by a poet of wood and hinges. He’d hoarded it for a while but then gave it to me, saying he knew that it was mine. I did the research and wrote the first draft in a night. Then I dithered. It was a sex robot story, sort of, and I had no interest in writing a sex robot story. It crossed the editor Liz Gorinsky’s desk, and she pointed to the contemporaneous female poet I’d mentioned only in the historical note, saying that she seemed like she should be in the story itself. I went back in, translated Qasmūna’s two extant poems, and brought her into the plot. Meanwhile, though, while trying to write about a muted woman burdened with magical loyalty to a man, and with hinges she hadn’t installed, I was dealing with the ways my whole life had gotten unhinged. See: Woman, Existing As One. “You didn’t make me. I grew,” was one of the more relevant things I could have said to my partners at that point. It was very hard to type it, even into a story about a golem made of wood. The rest of the story, when it finally worked, grew out of realizing that I might, unbeknown to myself, already have inside me what I n
eeded to survive. A while later, William Schafer of Subterranean Press sent me a note about a Dave McKean art-based anthology, The Weight of Words, and gave me the opportunity to choose a piece of Dave’s art to write around. It was easy: a naked woman curled into the crook beneath a tree rooted in a tremendous violin. There it was, the rest of the story. I’d been missing the golem’s most powerful instrument: her voice.
Micah Dean Hicks’s debut novel, Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, is forthcoming in 2019. His story collection, Electricity and Other Dreams—a book of dark fairy tales and bizarre fables—won the 2012 New American Fiction Prize. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Lightspeed Magazine, Kenyon Review, the Chicago Tribune, Witness, and others. He has won the Calvino Prize, Arts & Letters Prize, and Wabash Prize. Hicks grew up in rural southwest Arkansas and now lives in Orlando, Florida. He teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida.
■ I wrote this story as a kind of sequel to the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Six Swans.” When I first read the tale, I was struck by the cruelty of the ending. The youngest brother is transformed back into a boy, but because his shirt is unfinished, he has a swan’s wing in place of his left arm. I couldn’t get that youngest brother out of my head. Not only is he marked for the rest of his life, but he spent six years living as a swan. It occurred to me that he might have been a bird as long as he had been a boy. What would it be like for someone to trade the freedom of flight for being anchored to a world where they would never fit in? Would he miss being a boy with two arms or being a swan with two wings? There’s something so powerful about cruel fairy-tale endings, a world where magic makes anything possible but you still can’t get what you want. I wanted the ending of my story to sting with that same unfairness.
Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, and acquired several degrees in the arts and sciences. Now she writes speculative fiction in Portland, Oregon. Her debut novella, Every River Runs to Salt, will be out in late 2018. Contrary to the rumors, she is probably not a secret android. Jones is a World Fantasy Award nominee and Tiptree Award honoree. Her fiction has appeared in dozens of venues worldwide, including Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and PodCastle. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones.
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